The corridors and walkways of the Island were gloomy and shadowed. My first impression was that it was a wonder anyone could see anything in that confusion of darkness and sheer shafts of light. The profusion of lamps and dark patches led to everyone’s sight adjusting quickly. After a week or so I would have the “Island eyes” the same as everyone else. Even in the Underworld I never had such adaptable vision.
The bulky guard beside me could obviously find his way about without any problem at all. Further down the corridor I saw the first lamp. It was a pale hemisphere of something cloudy that seemed to illuminate nothing but itself and my prison greys. The guard beside me was almost invisible save for the pasty skin of his face. I realised that the Island must have a generator, and was a little impressed. Most buildings in Shadrapar no longer produced their own power, and we had oil and wood and waste for light and heat. The Island really was a little oasis of technical sophistication, albeit one forever on the point of breaking down.
We descended a flight of uneven stairs, the fourth of which was broken through. They all creaked dangerously under my captor’s weight. “Have to get someone to fix that,” the big man murmured as we reached the bottom. I had the distinct impression that he said the same thing every time he went down them. He stopped for a moment and squinted up at the lamp above us, and then lifted his free arm up to it. I saw a twist of reed in his hand, and with a certain deftness that belied his size he applied the end of the reed to the lamp and waited. In my experience, most artificial light is cold and done with something the books call “Bioluminance”. The lights within the Island were different: after a slow count of twenty the end of the reed sparked into fire, and the Warden inhaled the smoke down its hollow length.
We were amongst the inmates here. As my eyes grew accustomed to the poor light I saw that, beyond the barred walls on each side, there were prisoners. Three had been watching us silently all this time. One was facing away. One lay on the interleaved canes of the floor and appeared to be dead. There were surprisingly few of them.
The Warden took another long suck at his reed and then pulled me onwards again. The smoke seemed to have eased his temper. His grip was less painful and after a while he looked at me and said, “Midds.”
“Excuse me?” I whispered. I still hardly dared speak to the man.
“The name’s Midds,” he told me.
I nodded, wide-eyed.
“What’s yours again? Ardvard or something?”
“Advani,” I said, and he had to strain to hear me. “Stefan Advani,” I elaborated, perhaps a little too loud.
“Posh name,” he reflected. “You sound like an Academy boy.”
I stared at him for some time and he shrugged, jogging my arm. “We get all types here. Lowlives, merchants, Academy boys, even a few high-ups. We had a councillor three year ago. Didn’t last ten days.” He stared at me almost good-humouredly and took another pull at the reed. “Academy boy. You must be crapping yourself.”
I suspect my expression confirmed his words.
“You sing? Tell stories? Jokes? Ever learn to dance?”
I twisted in his grasp to look at him and asked him incredulously if he wanted me to dance.
“Just wondered. Things go better for everyone if you can do a trick. Keeps people happy,” the man called Midds explained. It was my first introduction to the Island economy, in which I would be given a more formal grounding later. At the time I was too frightened to take it in.
We had come to a stretch of corridor that looked just like the last, but Midds nodded and said, “This is my patch, for now. They move us around every ten days. Stops us getting attached.”
There were almost no prisoners in the cells here, and I began to worry whether this was a particularly fatal section of the Island. When I asked, Midds just laughed.
“They’re all hard at work,” he said. “Anyone that can, does. You’re lucky. You get a day off.”
Midds had reached a particular cell – one I was to know intimately soon enough – and was unlocking the door. The lock was large and simple, as was its key. Midds had only the one visible about him, and I realised that all of the doors on his beat must have the same lock. The real walls of the prison were made from the hostile jungle and the Marshal’s brutal rules.
“Your new home,” Midds told me. I looked in to see a room of a little over ten feet to a side. There were no bunks or any other furnishings, save for a wooden bucket in the centre of the floor whose use was obvious. On three walls, and above and below, there were other cells, with no barrier but the cane bars. If some incontinent prisoner on high were to miss the bucket, we’d all know it. And it did happen.
There was a man lying motionless there, along one wall. From the doorway the only thing I could discern about him was that he was wearing the same drab grey clothes as I was.
“What’s wrong with him?” I wanted to know, and Midds told me that he was sick and couldn’t work.
“I’m surprised that you haven’t killed him then.”
Midds shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Maybe some of the others would have. Me, I think he’s really ill. My stretch, my choice. When I was a kid I was brought up by Compassionates. You know, all life is one life, and that stuff?”
“So what if the Marshal told you to kill me?” I asked him.
“Oh, I’d kill you right where you stood,” Midds assured me. “Like I said, it was when I was a kid. The Marshal’s a mad bastard but he does make this place run.”
At that point someone called, “Hey Middsy! I’ll tell him you called him that!” Above our heads, on the next floor up, there was another Warden looking down.
“You say anything and I’ll kick your arse all the way to Shadrapar,” Midds called back easily. It was just banter, I realised, but Midds was certainly big enough to do it. Inside that sagging, paunchy frame were a lot of big bones.
“You’re not here for…” I began, once the other man had moved on, and then trailed to a halt awkwardly, wondering how to put it.
“Religious reasons?” Midds finished for me. “Hell no. Got a girl in trouble. It was here or the desert. Now, how about you get into your cell and save me having to do things my folks wouldn’t have approved of?”
I stepped in reluctantly, and he closed and locked the door behind me. “There’ll be food before dusk, and your cell mates will be coming back around then, too.”
“Who are my cell mates?” I asked, and he screwed up his face for a moment, thinking.
“Can’t remember. I’m sure they’ll tell you,” and then he was making his way down the corridor. The next lamp threw every detail of him into sharp relief and then he was gone.
I approached the still form of my current cell mate. He was lying on his side, facing the bars of the wall, and I could hear his scratchy breathing as I drew near. He sounded like some of the worst cases in the Underworld, the people who had come down to die. He was older than I expected, and small of build. I leant against the wall to get a view of his face, and saw it lined and square-chinned. His hair was grey and had been fashionably cut once. Strangely, I felt that I knew him from somewhere. He was still as a stone, and only his faint, wheezing breath told me that he was alive.
“He has the fever,” a voice told me. “It’s common enough that they call it Island Fever. About one in five die from it. He will be unlucky.”
I turned slowly, because the voice sounded as though the speaker was standing right at my shoulder. Instead, I saw a man within the latticed shadows of the next cell. I cast my mind back, and it seems that even then I saw something unusual about him, all the trouble that he had caused and would cause. Everyone else I spoke to told me they felt just the same. He had an aura about him that gave some part of your mind a window onto his horrible, dark soul. This was Gaki. Whilst I have served my time with monsters, killers, madmen, even the Macathars of the desert, I will say without reservation that Gaki was the worst of them all. He scared parts of me I did not even know existed.
“He caught it when he came in, three months ago,” he continued, “And then he seemed to recover, but he was worked too hard and treated too badly. He relapsed. Now he’ll die.” Gaki had a quiet, dry voice that could always be heard no matter how much noise was being made. It was a pleasant voice, fit for a Master of the Academy.
“Who are you?” I asked, because, however much I sensed the danger in him, there was a wall between us.
“People call me Gaki,” he acknowledged. “It’s not much of a name, but it’ll do.”
“Are you ill as well?”
He laughed lightly. “Not in the way you mean.”
“But you’re not put to work?”
“I do not choose to work,” he said simply and, although I tried to put another question to him on the subject, somehow I could not phrase the words. He could always do that. When Gaki chose to close a subject, nobody could force it open again. He was one of the best examples of the principle that power is at its greatest when not actually being used.
“My name is Stefan Advani,” I told him, and then, because the silence following it was awkward, I added needlessly, “I’m new here.” Gaki nodded politely.
“You sound like an educated man, Stefan Advani,” he observed. “I am always fond of intelligent conversation.” The innocuous words at last gave me a concrete reason to pin my misgivings on. I had been in this situation before. An education is a strange thing. It can save you when nothing else can, but it can tie you to some very undesirable characters. Gaki was not the first human horror to pick my brains for idle amusement. It might be noted that he was more human, and also more horrible, than some.
He stepped forward into a strip of light and I saw that he was no taller than I, and little broader across the shoulders. He was naked from the waist up and his body was lean and well-muscled, the frame of a fit man. He had a sharp face with a pointed chin, and very calm eyes. Those eyes never became excited, even in the heat of his worst savageries. They were impartial, objective observers to his violent life. His head was shaved like those of the Wardens – a sanitary measure, by the way. Lice and other parasites would soon be my constant companions. The prisoners were not allowed razors, for obvious reasons, but Gaki’s head was always closely shaved. Whether his stubble never grew out, or whether he just cut it down when nobody was watching, is a mystery to me.
“I don’t suppose you know Sandor’s Lying in State, by any chance?” he asked.
As it happened, I did. It was no great coincidence. Sandor is one of the wittiest of the modern writers, and his treatise on corruption in the Shadrapar body politic is a masterpiece, for all that it probably cost him his life. Every Academy student knows at least part of it, and social science is one of my fortes. So it came to pass that I spent the best part of a morning discussing literature and philosophy with a convicted murderer. I cannot say whether he knew the calming effect it would have on me, or whether the whole exercise was only for his own amusement. It did me a power of good, though. It pains me to be indebted to Gaki for anything, after all that he did later, but I owe him that small gratitude.
We were interrupted eventually by the sick man, who had awoken and was calling out, “Water…” in a voice like dry leaves. I looked around, but Gaki was shaking his head.
“They bring food and water at dawn and dusk,” he said. “If you work, you get something at midday. If not: nothing.”
“He’s ill, though. He needs water, food. He needs help,” I said.
“He’s on the long road to death, and needs no more than a push,” Gaki quoted. I recognised the words but could not place them.
“Can’t I do anything?” I asked.
“Tell him a story. Recite a poem,” Gaki suggested. “If you want, you could save some of your food and water for him, but then you’ll get weak, and what will you do when you get the fever?”
I went over to the sick man and stared down at him helplessly. He was looking up, but his eyes focused on nothing I could see. “Water…” he said again, but there was none to be had. Even fallen in upon itself, his face retained a classical dignity and I knew I recognised him. Like Gaki’s quote, I could not place him.
I tried to talk to him, but he could not seem to hear me, and his replies were just mumbles. He lapsed back into something like sleep soon after, although he was never completely still, twitching and gasping and crying out. Gaki had withdrawn into the depths of his cell, and I tried to strike up a conversation with him but never quite managed. Just by willing it, he had ended the discussion.
I hoped Shon Roseblade was having a better time of it than I was. I must have sat in silence for an hour, trying to count my blessings, before Gaki spoke again. “I knew him, you know,” he said.
“This man? Who is he?” I asked, thinking he meant my cell mate.
“Sandor,” Gaki said quietly. There was an extra quality in his voice as it lifted from the shadows. “Sandor the writer and philosopher. I knew him.”
Sandor had died before I started at the Academy, and for a moment I was brim-full of questions about the great man. What was he like? Was he as witty in real life as in his writings? Who was the lover he wrote poems for? How did he die?
In his unique way, Gaki had conveyed his meaning to me without ever saying it, and what I actually said was, “You killed him.”
“I knew him,” Gaki repeated, and I wondered whether it had been a random act of violence or a hired assassination, and came down on the side of the latter. Sandor’s book had made a lot of enemies in high places.
There was a long silence in which I could not speak because I knew that Gaki had not finished. “I knew him,” he eventually said again, but slower, and tinged with something that would be sadness in other men. I think it was the only thing that he ever regretted. There has always been a lot of speculation about the work that Sandor was partway through when he died. It is quite lost, although purported fragments surface every so often, and I saw a whole page of it in the Underworld. I sometimes try to picture the nights that Sandor and Gaki spent together, the great writer elaborating on his new project, his murderer-to-be listening. Perhaps it was Sandor, posthumously, that reworked Gaki from a normal killer into the creature I knew.
At the Academy we were taught that life is made of patterns that repeat themselves, that certain numbers are significant for certain people. The number four was surely my blessing and curse. Four deaths I narrowly missed, following my arrest (two behind me, at this point in the narrative, and two yet to come). Four of us banded together in Shadrapar to challenge the way the world thought. Three other like-minded desperate cases in the Underworld to join me in my time of need. Finally this official quartet: the full complement of a cell in the Island. The sick man I had met already. The other two appeared towards dusk as the working day ended.
The first I knew of my cell mates was Midds. He came down his section and opened all the doors. Had I been tempted to make a break for it, there were Wardens at either end of the corridor, and besides, there would be nowhere to go. Even later, when I learned that the swamp was not entirely deadly to human life, I never made the attempt. Almost nobody did. It really would have been an all-or-nothing bid. The Marshal, who had killed just to set an example, would have no mercy on a failed escapee.
All of a sudden there were two men coming in through the door, one large, one small. I shuffled back from them, and they both stared at me. Behind them, Midds passed back down the corridor, locking it all up again.
The large man was bigger in all dimensions than I, and his bare arms were knotty with muscles. He carried with him a sharp, chemical smell that I would soon recognise as the smell of the vats. He bore down on me until he was almost nose to nose, if he looked down and I craned my neck back. His face was square, literally, with a flat chin rising straight to meet lumpy, angular temples. His eyes were lost somewhere within the creases of their sockets.
“New boy,” he pronounced. I could tell that something unpleasant was about to happen to me and tried to summon my inner energies to resist it.
“What’re you in for?” the large man demanded.
“My name is Stefan Advani, and I was convicted of agitation, subversion and attempting to evade the course of justice,” I said promptly. When under pressure I had two distinct faults, before the Island cured me of them. Firstly, my voice became high and shrill and ostentatiously posh. Secondly, I used to blurt the truth out before I could think of a good fabrication. I think that if I had told him I was a murderer he might have thought twice before hitting me. Instead, he hit me. It was so quick and businesslike that I had no chance to do anything with all the inner energies I had been summoning. I just had time to turn my head away slightly so that his rock-hard fist slammed across my cheek rather than into my nose. I blacked out for a fraction of a second and was lying painfully on the barred floor when I awoke.
“Now you know what’s what,” he told me in some satisfaction. “I’m in charge here. Don’t you forget.”
I caught sight of Gaki. He had watched everything quite calmly; he had no more interest in me than in my ailing cell mate.
The large man was named Onager. Perhaps he was not an evil man by nature. He had been taken from a rough life on the streets of Shadrapar to this place, and the Marshal had taught him that violence breeds control, and that control was a good thing. He was only aping his keepers, and a single blow from Onager was better than being killed by the Marshal. The other man was Lucian Corek, and he was a good four inches shorter than me, and slightly hunched. After I had picked myself up, he came over to me. He had a broken nose, I noticed, and I recognised Onager’s calling card.
Lucian was a strange little man, but friendly, which was a rare commodity on the Island. Whilst Onager lapsed into sullen silence once he had made his point, Lucian talked. His talk was one of the most peculiar things about him: there was a vast amount of it that seemed to have no real purpose or function, and none of it was memorable. At the end of a conversation with Lucian I could remember in general what subjects he had covered, but not one of his actual words would stay with me. I will try and simulate his mode of speech for you, but I will only be writing things that sound like Lucian. The actual words were gone forever the moment they fled his lips.
He told me almost at once that he was here for forgery and bad debts. The status of bad debts in Shadrapar, where many people wore them like medals, is something I will talk of in the proper place. As for the other, he had forged official documents, and I assume that he had not been terribly good at it. He claimed to be a good hand with a bent printing press and, had I met him in the street, I could no doubt have made use of him. In the Island he provided another service. As long as he rattled on, the background awfulness of the place did not weigh so heavily on me. When he stopped, the dread quiet was almost unbearable.
“Tell me about him,” I asked, when I could get a word in, indicating the sick man. Here is my best attempt at Lucian’s reply.
“That poor fellow he’s not at all well, you know, he was never strong, I told them they shouldn’t make him do a full shift his second time round with it you see hasn’t even been here long, some people are just so unlucky but then that’s the way the world turns and you never know, so it’s as well to be prepared as I’m sure he’d say if only he was lucid, mind you he wasn’t too lucid before, came in not so long ago, two months maybe three, you lose track of time in a place like this you see, and the days are mostly one the same as the next, and that one the same as the next, although he hasn’t seen so many as I have what with being here only a few months, and already with the Island Fever twice, once when he first came like everyone gets and…” But you get the idea. And then he was going over to reassure the ailing man that everything was going to be fine, only at much greater length. He called the fever victim ‘Valentin’.
“Valentin?” I queried, and the name rang the same bells that the man’s face had. Lucian’s lengthy opinion was that the man was named something like Valentin Mildew.
“Valentin Miljus,” I said flatly, and Lucian thought for a blessedly silent moment and then confirmed that it was very probably something quite like that, very likely, yes indeed.
I went over to look at the sick man again and recognised him at last as Valentin Miljus. Not a friend, or even anyone I had met, but a face I knew. A large, leaden hand clamped across my shoulder, and Onager craned past, staring.
“You know him?” the big man asked.
“Know of him,” I admitted. I guessed that Valentin Miljus had kept himself to himself, even in his hale and hearty days. “He was the Lord Financier, last I heard,” I noted.
I heard Onager’s whistle of surprise and, because I had knowledge to impart, I forgot that he had knocked me down, and even forgot that we were all prisoners. I am always happiest when I can tell people things that they do not know. Perhaps that is why I am writing this.
“He was very high up in the Lord President’s staff,” I explained. “I saw him a few times at the Academy. He was a good speaker. Then he just dropped out of sight. Someone said that he’d been taken ill and had gone to his house in the suburbs to recover. Who dreamt that he had been dragged off here? I wonder what happened.”
It was around then that Midds turned up with the food. My first meal in the Island and there were a few unpleasant surprises awaiting me. Midds shoved four small wooden bowls and a jug through the largest gap between the bars and then walked on, pushing a makeshift trolley. Lucian darted over to take charge of them and handed one each to Onager and myself. I looked down and saw that it was part-full of some sort of stew in which unidentified things floated. There were strands of plant, and segments of something that must have been water reed. There were chunks of something white as well that fell into flakes when I prodded them. It looked like nothing I had ever seen before.
“Fish,” Onager said, and watched my horrified reaction.
“I’m supposed to eat a dead animal?” I demanded. In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach. Worse, the whole concoction was warm, despite the heat all around us. Back home we would not dream of eating anything warmer than room temperature, and the rich had their food and drink chilled.
Onager had my fish, and also Valentin’s entire meal, since Valentin was in no condition to eat. Lucian assured me that my resolve against eating meat would last two days. He said that on the first day I would refuse it, on the second I would eat, but be unable to keep it down, and on the third I would be an omnivore like everybody else.
I was just getting Valentin to take some water when Lucian explained to me where the food came from. To paraphrase, the various pumps that, amongst other tasks, kept the Island afloat, took in a lot of lake water. The lake water wasn’t exactly sparkling clear, and so there were sieves, which we inmates had to take out and clear. Everything that ended up in a sieve would end up in the pot, and from there to our bowls. Lucian suggested that the system had the virtue of variety.
“Everything,” I asked him weakly, “that goes into the sieves?”
His enthusiastic list included fish, frogs, snails, voles, insects, waterweed. Apparently there was a great deal of nature you could eat if you boiled it long enough.
The next morning I would wolf down everything they put in front of me, and throw some of it up as Lucian predicted. After that I would adjust.